If you are experienced with firearms, the crossbow is the only way to go. Remember that with Romero-zombies you have to destroy that brain, a very small target protected by pretty damn good bone frontal armor; you will need all the accuracy you can get. Of course there is a trade off, the same one that has been around since the Dark Ages; the crossbow is clumsier and much slower to reload. The amount of generated noise is much the same with both weapons, and can be reduced by the puffball silencers we hunters use to prevent whitetail deer from "jumping the string".

Speaking as a feller with considerable experience with both, however, I have to say that these would be two of the last weapons I would go with on Z-Day; gimme a good .22 with a scope and a field-expedient suppressor...if Obama hasn't finished doing away with all the ammo by then.

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I have to agree with about the .22 option over a stick shooter. I may ignite some tempers here but I never understood the fascination with bows for the Z-Poc, they are not a sustainable option. You are looking at 4 dollars an arrow on the LOW end, then you could spend anywhere between 2 dollars and 20 on a single broadhead to go on the end of that arrow. And contrary to popular belief even a top of the line arrow will bend if it hits something too hard and once that happens it is useless, and it WILL happen. I won't even go into the intense amount of care a bow/crossbow needs to function properly. You are better off spending the 6 dollars minimum for a single arrow for a box of 50 or more .22 rounds. Archery in the Z-Poc just wouldn't be economical or practical.

>>5052 here, and I know I just said that a bow would be one of the last weapons I would choose for Z-Day...and I stand by those words. The only way I could see a bow being useful would be in the future, if industrial society indeed collapses completely. There might come a time when we would want to conserve our remaining stores of ammunition for a time of dire need, and archers might come into play, presumably as part of a combined-arms team. In the old days, when archers were an integral part of military formations, they were always protected by pike/spearmen and cavalry; archers left on their own are suicidally vulnerable.

As for the sustainability of archery, you are correct if we are discussing modern bows. Archers would have to fall back on more traditional equipment; for instance, in Sengoku period Japan, samurai had a quota of arrows they were required to manufacture; in this way, the Daimyo never had to worry about his archers running out of fodder. You can't shoot such a field expedient arrow out of a modern compound hunting or target bow...but it would work just fine out of a good hand-made longbow...if you can find the good bowyers required to make them for you, of course.

You need years of training to be accurate or to use a powerful bow. If it is your first year, you will have to use a soft bow and you will not hit anything past 100m exept by chance.
On the other hand, if you train all day erryday since you are 6, you can use the english medieval longbow and kill a horse at 400m.

You can use a crossbow after one day of practice and with a decent reloading system it can be more powerful than a longbow.

Of course, you have to remember:
>bring archery to a gunfight

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>>5056

If it is just a mater of ammo, powder is easy to make for a decent chemist using potassium nitrate, sulfur and charcoal or with fertilizer and some other things.

There is guns designed to be loaded with literally anything like pic related and it is easy as fuck to make bad shootgun ammo with the case, that can be fond in huge quantity anywhere, bad powder and small balls of metal.

To OP: don't forget slingshots. They don't need maintenance, will last years, are cheap as dirt, light, quiet, can shoot anything and at close range they kill a zombie with one shoot in the head.
If they don't run, it is the best weapon just after the lightsaber. And you don't have a lightsaber.

You guys realise that gunshots will attract every zombie in the country and ammo will run out eventually. An arrow can be made of a carved stick.

I love bows; during term-time, I shot every tuesday and saturday for two hours since 13 through to my graduation.

With the luxury of a homestead environment, I would choose the compound. The arrow would be heavier, carry more impact even with comparable penetration. And if things got ugly, I could reload and loose twice as fast and even have the luxury to breathe out.

But in SHTF situation,I would not choose a compound or a crossbow. I would use a takedown recurve (with iron sights) or longbow. I'd hate to think what mud and moisture would do to the moving parts over a the period of a year, a third of which would be raining.

And on the road, with all your kit and supplies, I'd hate to be carrying around a contraption that doesn't change shape, fragile high-performance, precision contraption. If I could, I'd avoid the ironsights till hunting sessions.


Arrows: I've not made my own arrows before, but I've been told then can shatter with the high-performance , high poundage bows of today. Carrying around anything more than 20 arrows for a week on top of your gear would start to annoy me. Archery is really a homesteader's tool.

>>5073
>ammo will run out eventually
People reload their own ammo all the time. It's not uncommon at all.
>gunshots will attract every zombie in the country
A regular gunshot would for a couple miles at least, yes. That's why you get a suppressor. Yes I realize a suppressor is not a "silencer" that makes your gun dead silent like it does in the movies, but it does keep the sound from carrying as far. On top of that, a suppressed bullet shot past a tree at a distance, for example, would make it sound like it was coming from the tree, not from the shooter. That's the point of a suppressor.

tl;dr a suppressor will make it sound like it's coming from a different direction and won't carry as far.

>>5103
I reload myself, but the day will come (if the zombies do take over or if Obama & Co. have their way) when there will be no more powder, bullets, or primers. That will be a ways down the road, but if society falls...which the idea of a Zombie Apocalypse kinda demands...the supply of ammo is going to be finite.

That said, as long as the ammo DOES hold out, I will be using a firearm. And I'm totally with you on the use of suppressors. I can't make one myself, but I know guys with the tools, the materials, the skills, and the plans. Those guys will never want for employment once all the ATF cocksuckers are walking corpses shambling around looking for brains to eat.